SUICIDE
in the Berlin bunker was a tragic end
to an unhappy life but Eva Braun was
never a Nazi, Gertraud Weisker
tells our correspondent

WHAT do we know about Eva Braun?
She was blonde, she was pretty and she was
Hitler's lover. They committed
suicide together in Hitler's Berlin
bunker. That made her name -- nobody
really knew she existed until then,
concealed as she had been from his adoring
public. She liked clothes too. We know
that, but otherwise her healthy farmgirl's
face, framed by its blonde curls, conjures
up something of a blank: a woman dancing
merrily on the surface of life.

Gertraud Weisker knows
differently. At 78, she is Eva Braun's
last living relative -- her cousin and the
woman who spent the best part of the last
year of Braun's life with her in the
Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat in
Obersalzberg.

Weisker
last saw Braun in January 1945 and, until
three years ago, kept her past, and her
fading photo-albums, hidden from the
world. But shortly after her husband's
death Weisker told her story. No use going
to the grave with all those secrets, she
thought. And she wanted to restore her
cousin's good name.

Yes, Eva was self-preoccupied and
silly. But, claims Weisker, the historians
have got it wrong. Eva was not a Nazi. She
was a victim, an unhappy, caged and
desperate victim who suffered from lack of
confidence and depression. The Nazi wives
shunned her, she was alone; who in her
position would not have acted as she did?
The cousins had known each other since
they were small. Their mothers were
sisters and the families holidayed
together in Munich. As an only child,
Weisker was susceptible to the charms of
her three older cousins: Ilse,
Eva and Gretel
[sic.
Gretl]. When in 1944, at 20,
she was invited to join the 32-year-old
Braun in Munich, she defied her anti- Nazi
parents' wishes and took a train from her
home town of Jena. Her decision to go had
nothing to do with the lure of the
Führer, she insists. "I wanted to be
with Eva. That's it."

Weisker
remembers Eva at 17, the year she met
Hitler while working as an apprentice
for his official photographer. Already
she was a woman dedicated to her
appearance -- not vain, but conscious
of the effect her "dreamy beauty" had
on others.

When Weisker was in her mid-teens,
Braun gave her a satin bra, having first
relieved her of the chest brace, a
painful, breast-squashing device. "Eva was
like my older sister. Of course I had to
go to see her," says Weisker. Only Braun
was not there to meet her cousin in
Munich. Instead, two SS officers drove
Weisker to the Berghof. Braun was lonely
and Hitler had allowed her to invite a
guest.

Weisker, a shy, bookish physics
student, was a perfect candidate.

Nor was Braun there to meet her when
Weisker reached the Berghof. She had gone
for a dip in the Königssee, a pastime
which, along with watching films, smoking
cigarettes, trying on clothes and eating
food from Hitler's gourmet kitchen, was to
make up their languid existence for six
months. As Hitler never returned to the
Berghof after July 14, 1944, Weisker never
met him.

And
what did young German women talk about in
the 1940s while Hitler was, variously,
recovering from an assassination attempt,
digesting the shock of the D-Day landings
and pondering the fate of the Jews in
Auschwitz? Politics? "No," says Weisker.
"We did not talk about that. We were
always surrounded by two or three SS men.
We couldn't." Boyfriends, then? "Never.
Definitely not. One just
didn't. I never
talked to Eva about Hitler."

What about Braun's two failed suicide
attempts? "No. No. It was a different
time. Eva always lived in a dream world.
When the reality was not good, she pushed
it away. Politically, she was not aware of
anything. In that sense she never really
became an adult, she was a child: she was
mad about sport, she liked to take
pictures and she was interested in clothes
and fashion. That was her world. We never
once had a profound conversation."

But there were little acts of
insubordination. Smoking, for example.
Women in the Third Reich were not supposed
to smoke, drink or wear make-up. Braun and
Weisker did all three. You can picture the
two cousins applying their lipsticks in
their surreal paradise. Harder to imagine
is Weisker's claim that they never talked.
"I cannot make up things she didn't say,"
Weisker insists. Braun would change her
clothes as often as seven times a day.
When her cousin arrived at the Berghof,
Braun told her to remove her shoes. A
servant appeared with a basket full of
Braun's more fashionable, albeit smaller,
versions.

Presumably she and Braun had an inkling
about the persecution of Jews? "Well we
did not know about the concentration
camps. No. But I knew there was something,
because we had a lot of Jewish friends who
were moving to America. And Der
Stürmer the Nazi newspaper was on
every street corner although my parents
forbade me from looking at it.

"I had a neighbour, Frau Jacobi.
She used to bake us biscuits but one day
she said: 'Gertraud, you mustn't talk to
me any more.' A few nights later she
gassed herself." Weisker shakes her
head.

At times the guilt must have been
intolerable: sealed off from the terror
endured by the rest of the population.
"Guilt?" says Weisker. "What do I have to
feel guilty for?" Weisker has become
something of a celebrity in Germany: she
has appeared on chat shows, given many
interviews and had a novel based around
her experiences at Obersalzberg.

This is not the first time the guilt
issue has come up and yet her affronted
surprise suggests the opposite. "No," she
says firmly. "I was an onlooker, a
bystander, never a Nazi. I was never a
member of the party, nor was Eva.

Braun was a young woman who happened to
fall in love. She was unpolitical and I
think she would have loved him whoever he
was. Right from the beginning she probably
said to herself, 'I have chosen this path
and I will follow it'.

What amazes me is Hitler's popularity
among women -- he must have had this
magnetism." And these women, were they
Nazis? "No I don't think so, they just
worshipped him, like young people today
worship Michael Jackson. But I don't think
Eva belonged to those people. She knew him
on a different level."

Weisker points out again that it was
never her intention to end up at the
Berghof. "For me that world was
oppressive. And I felt oppressed by my
challenge -- to get her out of that
lethargy. That is why I stayed. I wanted
to get behind what it was that bound her
to this man, I wanted to support her.

"But she was very depressed and I was
not a therapist -- I realised that she was
completely lost. She was the unhappiest
woman I have ever met."

Her cousin had been a cheerful
teenager, says Weisker, but by 1944 her
once natural exuberance seemed forced.
Hitler would call Braun regularly every
two days. If the phone call came late, it
would plunge Braun into anxiety: "I could
have said anything at those times but I
knew she was not listening. She just sat
there waiting, straining for that call as
if it was the most important thing in her
life." In December 1944, Weisker and her
cousin found themselves sheltering beneath
Braun's home in Munich -- the one given to
her by Hitler after her second suicide
attempt. The air raid was an uncomfortable
conclusion to what had started out as a
shopping trip. Frightened by the bombing,
Braun gave Weisker some jewellery,
thinking that she would no longer be
needing it. A few months earlier, Weisker
had discovered a radio in Hitler's tea
house from which she picked up BBC
broadcasts in German -- it was a crime
punishable by death but it enabled her to
relay Germany's deteriorating position to
her cousin, now visibly struggling with
the situation and hungry for information,
but terrified of bad news. Weisker
believes that her dispatches prepared
Braun for what was to come. "She became
quieter and less cheerful. She was less of
a dreamer. It was as if she had suddenly
woken up to reality, a reality that she
did not recognise. It has only recently
become clear to me that, had I not gone
home, she might not have gone to
Berlin."

Three months after Weisker went back to
Jena, Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, or the
Hitlers as they became for the last 36
hours of their lives, committed suicide
together in a Berlin bunker. The news
reached Weisker in early summer 1945. She
was sad but not shocked.

"It was a suitable conclusion. She had
nothing. He ripped her out of her job and
damned her to loneliness in the mountains.
It was an unavoidable end and the logical
result of everything that had gone
before."

It has taken Gertraud Weisker an hour
and a half to tell her story and the
strain is showing. There are
inconsistencies in her story --
"contradictions are what life is all
about," she explains. "There is so much
that I cannot remember. It was more than
50 years ago. This is where the chapter
ends. No more. I don't want to talk any
more."